This invention relates to a method for finishing cooked bacon bits which improves their visual appearance and pourability.
Cooked bacon bits are widely used as a garnish on salads, potato skins, baked potatoes and vegetables. Bacon bits are also often used as an ingredient in omelettes, quiche, cheese sauces and with prepared meat and fish dishes. Bacon bits from real bacon, as opposed to vegetable protein food products made to resemble cooked and crumbled bacon, are made two primary ways. One is to grind the raw bacon and cook it. The other is to cook pieces of bacon, chill the cooked bacon and then pass the cooked, chilled bacon through a dicer. The cooking-dicing method is often preferred because particles of bacon making up the bacon bits are true pieces, not ground clumps of bacon. With either method, however, the resulting bacon bits will be made up of larger pieces and much smaller pieces called fines.
With some applications, such as when the bacon bits are used at a salad bar, it is very desirable that the bacon bits appear as uniform, relatively large pieces. One way to doing this is to separate the fines from the larger pieces and sell the two components separately. Since fines can make up about 30% of the weight of bacon bits, this necessarily raises the price of the separated bacon pieces greatly because of a lower market value for fines.